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It is as if knowledge about them was methodically wiped off history, or more likely (since history is written by non-engineers) it was not understood well enoug

It is as if knowledge about them was methodically wiped off history, or more likely (since history is written by non-engineers) it was not understood well enough to write about it.

sgt101 7y ago
I think - just not of interest !
empath75 7y ago
It seems like only a handful of people ever made them and it probably didn’t even last for very long after Archimedes died. It was essentially an extraordinarily expensive toy.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  It was essentially an extraordinarily expensive toy. So not unlike early cars. By 1900, at least 100 different brands of horseless carriages were being marketed in the United States. Since they were all virtually handmade, the cars were outrageously expensive. Cars were perceived as no more than a high-priced toy for the rich. The early 1900s cars were, to many, a despicable symbol of arrogance and power. https://www.anythingaboutcars.com/early-1900s-cars.html https://www.anythingaboutcars.com/early-1900s-cars.html
- sgt101 7y ago
  There's good evidence that this kind of thing was made in the Arab world in the "dark ages" and that many of the moving statues in western europe were powered from the same sort of mechanisms in the medeival period. Great listen here : https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk1c4d https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk1c4d
- xenadu02 7y ago
  Because the design and engineering greatly outstripped the extant methods of manufacturing the devices didn’t actually work that well. It would take another 1000 years of slow incremental improvements in manufacturing to be able to make one of these devices accurate enough to be useful. If you want to make civilization resistant to collapse and increase its ability to recover quickly: bury gear cutters, lathes, magnifying glasses, precision tools, etc. The most difficult part will be bootstrapping the ability to build accurate tools with which to rebuild an industrial society.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    One of the things most interesting to me about the mechanism is that it devotes a lot of gears and hardware to making small corrections which get completely overwhelmed by the inaccuracy of the manufacturing.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    It's actually possible to build a working machine lathe out of the parts of an ordinary car engine. If you really wanted to make society collapse resistant, including a manual about how to do so, a couple of tungsten carbide bits, and a couple of hacksaw blades with every car would probably do the trick. I think everything else you need (welding equipment, drills, etc) would be fairly straightforward to cobble together.
ken 7y ago
No need to posit a conspiracy here. People died, and there weren't enough new people entering the field to learn it all before the critical mass of knowledge died with them. I believe that the bulk of knowledge, in most fields, is passed from person to person through active practice, not through books. Books, as a cheap way to widely distribute knowledge, are relatively recent innovation, and most of what I know about any topic is not written in books. Or if it is, it's almost an afterthought, not the primary method of knowledge transfer. What book did you read to learn to tie your shoes, or drive a standard transmission? On a related note: what is humanity's Bus Factor for creating a CPU? I know a little about semiconductors from school but I certainly wouldn't know where to start, even for a tiny 8-bit one. I doubt Intel writes down everything they've figured out. Could 2 or 3 especially unlucky "city-killer" asteroids send us back to a pre-information-age society?
- person_of_color 7y ago
  Relevant book: A Canticle For Leibowitz.
- lloeki 7y ago
  What’s your goal? Rebuilding an Intel class modern CPU or just making a crude one? Transistors give you logic gates and opamps, from which you can build computation and memory, add a clock to apply input from a certain address (the PC) to a set of logic gates (the instruction set) that can read and store and you have a very crude (and very inefficient) programmable CPU in no time (compared to something even remotely like a 8080 or even a 6502) A good approach to get more knowledgeable is going bottom-up from transistors and top-down from FPGA (and suffer Verilog/VHDL), attempting to experiment and design your own instruction set while trying to understand the physics and logic, progressively bridging the gap in between in both directions.
- TheOtherDave 7y ago
  If you’re talking about losing the ability to recreate any particular relevant CPU, then maybe. But computers in general? No. I suppose we could be exceptionally unlikely and lose access to all the modern fabs, but the knowledge of CPU design is too widespread to for us to plausibly lose the ability to make new CPUs altogether.
analog31 7y ago
It could be that the thing just had no use, or that it became obsolete. I can imagine prediction of the seasons being useful for agriculture and trade, but people may have figured out how to do that without a calculating machine. Astrological uses would have depended on the particular astrology being in use.
goto11 7y ago
Information from antiquity is lost by default. It is only preserved if there has been is a continuous line of people preserving it.

It is as if knowledge about them was methodically wiped off history, or more likely (since history is written by non-engineers) it was not understood well enough to write about it.

sgt101 7y ago

I think - just not of interest !

empath75 7y ago

It seems like only a handful of people ever made them and it probably didn’t even last for very long after Archimedes died. It was essentially an extraordinarily expensive toy.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
It was essentially an extraordinarily expensive toy. So not unlike early cars. By 1900, at least 100 different brands of horseless carriages were being marketed in the United States. Since they were all virtually handmade, the cars were outrageously expensive. Cars were perceived as no more than a high-priced toy for the rich. The early 1900s cars were, to many, a despicable symbol of arrogance and power. https://www.anythingaboutcars.com/early-1900s-cars.html https://www.anythingaboutcars.com/early-1900s-cars.html
sgt101 7y ago
There's good evidence that this kind of thing was made in the Arab world in the "dark ages" and that many of the moving statues in western europe were powered from the same sort of mechanisms in the medeival period. Great listen here : https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk1c4d https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bk1c4d
xenadu02 7y ago
Because the design and engineering greatly outstripped the extant methods of manufacturing the devices didn’t actually work that well. It would take another 1000 years of slow incremental improvements in manufacturing to be able to make one of these devices accurate enough to be useful. If you want to make civilization resistant to collapse and increase its ability to recover quickly: bury gear cutters, lathes, magnifying glasses, precision tools, etc. The most difficult part will be bootstrapping the ability to build accurate tools with which to rebuild an industrial society.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  One of the things most interesting to me about the mechanism is that it devotes a lot of gears and hardware to making small corrections which get completely overwhelmed by the inaccuracy of the manufacturing.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  It's actually possible to build a working machine lathe out of the parts of an ordinary car engine. If you really wanted to make society collapse resistant, including a manual about how to do so, a couple of tungsten carbide bits, and a couple of hacksaw blades with every car would probably do the trick. I think everything else you need (welding equipment, drills, etc) would be fairly straightforward to cobble together.

ken 7y ago

No need to posit a conspiracy here. People died, and there weren't enough new people entering the field to learn it all before the critical mass of knowledge died with them. I believe that the bulk of knowledge, in most fields, is passed from person to person through active practice, not through books. Books, as a cheap way to widely distribute knowledge, are relatively recent innovation, and most of what I know about any topic is not written in books. Or if it is, it's almost an afterthought, not the primary method of knowledge transfer. What book did you read to learn to tie your shoes, or drive a standard transmission? On a related note: what is humanity's Bus Factor for creating a CPU? I know a little about semiconductors from school but I certainly wouldn't know where to start, even for a tiny 8-bit one. I doubt Intel writes down everything they've figured out. Could 2 or 3 especially unlucky "city-killer" asteroids send us back to a pre-information-age society?

person_of_color 7y ago
Relevant book: A Canticle For Leibowitz.
lloeki 7y ago
What’s your goal? Rebuilding an Intel class modern CPU or just making a crude one? Transistors give you logic gates and opamps, from which you can build computation and memory, add a clock to apply input from a certain address (the PC) to a set of logic gates (the instruction set) that can read and store and you have a very crude (and very inefficient) programmable CPU in no time (compared to something even remotely like a 8080 or even a 6502) A good approach to get more knowledgeable is going bottom-up from transistors and top-down from FPGA (and suffer Verilog/VHDL), attempting to experiment and design your own instruction set while trying to understand the physics and logic, progressively bridging the gap in between in both directions.
TheOtherDave 7y ago
If you’re talking about losing the ability to recreate any particular relevant CPU, then maybe. But computers in general? No. I suppose we could be exceptionally unlikely and lose access to all the modern fabs, but the knowledge of CPU design is too widespread to for us to plausibly lose the ability to make new CPUs altogether.

analog31 7y ago

It could be that the thing just had no use, or that it became obsolete. I can imagine prediction of the seasons being useful for agriculture and trade, but people may have figured out how to do that without a calculating machine. Astrological uses would have depended on the particular astrology being in use.

goto11 7y ago

Information from antiquity is lost by default. It is only preserved if there has been is a continuous line of people preserving it.